INTEL 335 240GB SSD ERP: $194.99 | Website: www.intel.com
Test Machine • Intel Core i7 3970X • ASUS Rampage IV Gene (3404) • CORSAIR Dominator Platinum 4x4GB DDR 2666MHZ CL10 • Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1500W • Windows 7 64-bit SP1
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F-2281 powered drives. What haven’t we said already about such SSDs? This is the default controller these days and if you’re not sure about a drives’ internals, chances are its powered by one of these. They have become ubiquitous in the market, that even people who are not by any measure technocrats are familiar with them. These are not bad controllers per say, as they do depending on configuration allow for drives to have completely different
24 The OverClocker Issue 23 | 2013
characteristics from one another. On the low end you’ll get off the shelf solutions which pretty much produce the kinds of results we first saw when the controller made its debut. On the opposite end of the spectrum you may find drives such as the KINGSTON Hyper X 3K which are amongst the upper echelon of consumer grade SSDs. This capacity to cater and be tailored to different markets is possibly one of the controller’s strongest selling points. We have had more than our fair share of such drives, but there’s no indication that they will stop anytime soon. They sell and consumers demand them, so we best get used to it. In as far as INTEL is concerned the 335 series drives are as with the 520, powered by this controller. We’d like to tell you something interesting here in about the hardware but we simply can’t. There’s no DRAM to speak of for caching and the only remotely interesting facet of this drive is the 20nm NAND
that INTEL has gone with. What that means in essence is that the NAND lasts a shorter time than the larger lithography NAND but INTEL assures us that the drives are still good for 1.2Million hours. Add a 3 year warranty to that and you’re looking at once again, a fairly off the mill drive. If you’re looking at top notch performance, well you’ll not find it here. It’s not to say the drive is slow though, as we recorded sequential read performance higher than what we did with the Vertex4, also in the issue. That’s some stellar performance there in that discipline, but after that the praises stop. From there on it behaves much like a generic drive with sequential write numbers lower than 250MB/s and a 4K Write that is particularly low at 97.82MB/s (less than one third the performance of the CORSAIR Neutron 240GB). We also found the IOPS performance somewhat average but it could be that we